Martin Scorsese revives plans for ‘Devil in the White City’ with Leonardo DiCaprio set to star
A Martin Scorsese project that seemed to be dead in the water is surprisingly now back for another round of development. The movie, based on Erik Larson’s 2004 nonfiction thriller Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, is set to be adapted with Leonardo DiCaprio as star and co-producer.
The book chronicles the horrifying true story of Dr H H Holmes, a serial killer who stalked and lured between 27 and 200 victims to their deaths at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.
Tom Cruise was the first Hollywood mogul to secure the rights for the book with the intention to make it for Paramount, but his option lapsed in 2004. DiCaprio’s production company Appian Way purchased the rights in 2010, and five years later, Scorsese signed on as director, with Captain Phillips screenwriter Billy Ray set to pen the script.
As late as 2017, the project was still going ahead, but it collapsed sometime later, leaving the fate of the property up in the air. Keanu Reeves was set to star in a streaming series adaptation of the book in 2019, but a few years later, that plan fell through as well.
Now, Scorsese and DiCaprio are full steam ahead, per Variety. No dates have been set for release or production, and there is still no script. Whether Ray is still on board to write the screenplay is also unclear.
The director and star have made six movies together, including The Aviator, The Wolf of Wall Street, and 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
Before the announcement that they would be joining forces for The Devil in the White City after all, they had already announced plans to make The Wager, an adaptation of a nonfiction book by Killers of the Flower Moon author David Grann.
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